Zen is often advised to businesses as a “free source of traffic”: start a channel, write articles, get thousands of views. The numbers in the statistics look nice - but if your goal is customers from search and the growth of your own website, it is important to understand how Zen actually works. Let's look honestly, without marketing hype: what views are in Zen, why they are not equal to traffic from search, and why you are not building your SEO asset on this platform.
Zen is a feed, not a search
The main thing to understand is that Zen is a recommendation platform, not a search engine. Content here is not found by request - it is shown by the algorithm in the personal feed to those users whom the system has deemed suitable. A person scrolls through the feed, comes across your card, and sometimes clicks.
This is a fundamentally different scenario than search. In the search, a person himself formulates a request - “order a website”, “set up contextual advertising”, “how to choose a contractor” - and purposefully searches for a solution. He's hot, he's ready for action. In Zen's feed, a person is simply killing time. The difference in intent is dramatic, and explains why Zen views rarely turn into applications.
Views in Zen are not traffic from search
This is where the main confusion lies. “Views” and “reads” in Zen statistics are internal metrics of the platform: how many times your card appeared in the feed and how many people finished scrolling through the article. These are not transitions from organic search on Yandex or Google.
That is, 10,000 views in Zen and 10,000 clicks from search are completely different things. The first is algorithmic impressions inside a closed platform, which end exactly when the algorithm stops promoting you. Secondly, these are people who found you based on their request and came to your website. Considering feed views as an “SEO result” is a typical mistake that builds a false sense of effectiveness.
Who Really Owns the Content and Audience?
Another point that is rarely talked about. Articles in Zen are published on the dzen.ru domain - and not on your website. Several unpleasant conclusions follow from this:
- SEO weight goes to the platform, not you. Even if an article in Zen is indexed somewhere, the domain dzen.ru accumulates search weight, links and authority. Your own site does not grow one position from this.
- Rented auditorium. Channel subscribers live in the Zen ecosystem. Change platforms or be subject to an algorithm change, and you lose access to these people. You don't own the audience, you rent it.
- You don't dictate the rules. Reach, monetization and display logic change at the discretion of the platform. Today they promote you, tomorrow they cut off impressions, and you cannot influence this.
Why don't you find yourself when you search?
Many people are surprised: “I’ve been publishing on Zen for months, but I don’t see myself in the search for my topics.” The reason is simple. Zen is a “walled garden”: the platform is interested in keeping traffic and attention within itself, and not giving it to search results for the benefit of authors. Zen publications are inconsistently included in searches, and when they do appear, it is a result under the dzen.ru domain, which works for the platform, and not for the recognition and position of your site.
As a result, a paradox arises: there seems to be content, views are coming, but your site was not found in searches for commercial queries. Because all this time you weren’t building the search asset for yourself.
What does this mean for business?
If you rely on Zen as your main channel, you get the same risks as with advertising:
- I don't have my own asset. If you stop publishing or fall under the algorithm, the flow stops. There is no cumulative effect like SEO on your website.
- The domain is not gaining weight. All signals are lost to the platform, and your site does not rank higher in search results.
- There is no control and predictability. The rules of the game are changed by the platform at any time.
- Limited analytics. You see feed metrics, but not a full picture of the client’s path to the application.
When Zen is still useful
Let's be completely honest: Zen is not evil and not useless. As a channel, it solves its problems well:
- Reach and recognition. You can quickly show your brand to a large audience.
- Warm content. Stories, cases, expert analyzes that build trust.
- Distribution. A great way to give your material extra life.
- Theme test. You can see from the reaction of the tape that the audience is coming.
But all this is the role of an additional channel, not a foundation. The mistake is not in using Zen, but in considering it a replacement for SEO and your own website.
How to do it right: first your website, then Zen
The correct order for working with content looks like this:
- Publish the article first on your website. Here it is indexed, ranked for queries, builds the authority of your domain and brings requests from SEO promotion. This is your asset that belongs only to you.
- Make a website ready for this. The correct structure, speed, micro markup - all this is laid down at the stage website creation and management blog.
- And only then duplicate and announce the material in Zen — for the sake of coverage and a warm audience.
So you get both: a search asset on your domain plus additional platform coverage. It is on this principle that our blog is structured: articles live and are indexed on the site, and go to Zen as a distribution channel, and not as a basis.
It’s worth looking separately at new channels - advancements in neural networks And optimization for quick responses: there, unlike a closed feed, you work on the visibility of your site and brand.
What if you put links to your website in Zen?
A logical question: “Okay, let the content live on dzen.ru - but I’ll put a link to my website in the article, and people will go over.” In practice this doesn't work well, and here's why.
Firstly, the platform is not interested in letting the user out. External links in Zen are limited, often blocked from transmitting search weight (the nofollow attribute) and are not visually highlighted. Such a link gives almost no link authority to your site - and it is the link profile that remains one of the key ranking factors.
Secondly, the audience of the tape is passive. A person scrolls through Zen to have fun, and not to go somewhere and leave a request. The share of those who will reach your site after viewing it, and even more so before contacting you, is usually measured in units of percent.
The conclusion is simple: you shouldn’t expect that Zen will “drive” search traffic and link juice for you through links in articles. For this there is SEO on your own website, where every published article works for your positions, and not for someone else’s platform.
Conclusion
Zen is a storefront, not a warehouse. Feed views are attention rented from the platform, not search traffic or a growing asset. If you count these views as an SEO result, it’s easy to spend months and not move your site one step forward in the rankings.
Build a foundation on what is yours—your own site and its content—and use Zen as a reach amplifier on top of that foundation. If you want to build content marketing that is actually indexed and brings customers from search, and not just collects views in someone else’s feed, this is where you should start. Since 2014, the Dom Marketing agency has been building just such systems: a website, SEO and content working for your asset, and not for someone else’s platform.